Before the days of Moses there was friendly intercourse, as we have seen, between Mesopotamia and Egypt. In later ages Assyria and Egypt were frequently at war with one another. The hostile armies were obliged to march through Palestine; and it became very difficult for the kings of Israel and Judah to look on with equanimity and preserve a strictly neutral attitude. Yet if they favoured one of the great powers they of course gave umbrage to the other; besides which, Assyria, in the days of its power, could hardly brook to leave any small kingdom independent. At length Samaria was conquered, and its inhabitants deported, by Shalmaneser or by Sargon; and afterwards Judea also, by Nebuchadnezzar.
Speaking of the captivity of Israel in Babylonia as a providential event, a great German writer, Lessing, says,—"When the child, by dint of blows and caresses had come to years of understanding, the father sent it at once into foreign countries, and here it recognised at once the good which in its father's house it had possessed but not been conscious of."[1] Again he says,—"The child, sent abroad, saw other children, who knew more, who lived more becomingly, and asked itself in confusion, why do I not know that too? why do I not live so too? ought I not to have been taught and admonished of all this in my father's house?"
It is because of this sojourn abroad of the Jews, and the influence of other nations upon them, that the exploration of these eastern countries is a matter of such importance to Bible students. In Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt we get into by-paths of Bible history, and the old records when unearthed, read sometimes like new chapters of the Bible.
The land of Mesopotamia, not inaptly called a graveyard of empires and nations, is now neglected and desolate, under Turkish misrule. "The monotony of the landscape would be unbroken" (says Zénaïde A. Ragozin) "but for
- ↑ Lessing: "Education of the Human Race."
